Water, energy and food are essential for human well-being, poverty reduction and sustainable development.

The term ‘nexus’ has been used in a variety of contexts with the aim of advancing the understanding of how sectors are inter-linked, how sector policies impact each other and, in turn, to inform coherent cross-sectoral governance. When resources become scarcer and demand for them increases, developing and implementing sectoral plans independently, without accounting for physical constraints and trade-offs and impacts across sectors, society becomes more vulnerable because spill-over effects across sectoral policies become more expensive and unsustainable. In other words, the interlinkage (or “nexus”) between sectors becomes stronger and this calls for coherent, responsible and consultative planning.

The nexus approach recognizes the inherent connections between water, energy and agricultural management, and the environmental implications of each. These connections have not typically been considered explicitly in water, energy, and agricultural management decision making; thereby increasing the potential for conflicts of interest between sectors relying on the same set of resources as pressure on these grows.